What Connects This Wall with Queen Victoria, Charlie Kerins and Michael Collins?

Charlie Kerins remains the last I.R.A. member to be condemned to death by the state and executed. That was on 1st December, 1944. A plaque to commemorate Charlie Kerins was erected at Easter 1947 and removed in May 1947 and was subsequently replaced.
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Memorials that have been damaged, removed or vandalised have been an interest of mine for some years. When doing the Local History course, I cited page 105 of Clodagh Tait’s book in more than two or three essays – ‘Tait suggests that the propaganda effect of some memorials and statues could not be overcome, except by their removal.’
 
Queen Victoria’s statue at the Aula Maxima in U.C.C. was removed and replaced with one of St. Finbarr.  It was buried for over 60 years before going back on display. Streetsigns bearing the name Victoria were painted over in recent years. The statue of Victoria that stood at Dáil Éireann was removed and spent a long time in storage before being sent to Australia.
 
Victoria’s was not the only memorial to be removed from the lawn of Leinster House. A cenotaph was erected in 1923 and had two panels, one commemorating Arthur Griffith: the other commemorating Michael Collins. This temporary structure deteriorated for many years before being replaced at a different location at Leinster House.
 
My own list of memorials damaged or removed has reached 65 and the categories of those commemorated varies widely. 

‘The commemorative function of monuments was paramount. However, the expression of loss and regret for the dead was inextricably entwined with and, to an extent, secondary to attempts to continue the memory of their owners’ personal and social identities……..
 ….the endlessly manipulable nature of funeral monuments could become invaluable. By choosing an identity from the most socially acceptable elements of one’s past, present and future, and rendering this in stone, a medium which by its very nature could convey added veracity, solidity and permanency, reality could be created and controlled by the patron. Moreover, once reality is constructed in this manner, monuments allow for no doubt or argument. Their owners may be denounced or discredited, but monuments will continue to proclaim their own brand of truth. This is why contemporaries occasionally found it necessary to destroy monuments. The propaganda element inherent in them could not be countered in any other way.’
 Clodagh Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550-1650, p.105.

Back to the wall of St Iberius’s Church at Broadway in Co. Wexford. A plaque to Fiona Sinnott was removed the night before its planned unveiling in 2008. A replacement plaque was subsequently also removed. The adhesive/render is all that remains.
 
A plaque was erected at Kilmore Quay in 2018.